Thursday, November 4, 2010

The U.S. wants to wiretap the internet. The UK wants to make it easy to get 3rd party content removed. MarkJ reports on ISPreview.com that:

The UK governments Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, Ed Vaizey, has ominously proposed that broadband ISPs could introduce a new Mediation Service that would allow them the freedom to censor third party content on the internet, without court intervention, in response to little more than a public complaint.

The proposal is supposed to be for the benefit of regular citizens, but it is easy to imagine the abuse by corporations and organizations (RIAA, MPAA, et al) who would use it as a club to attempt to force consumers to conform to industry ideas of how things should be.

It is sad that proposals to help protect citizens must be either be so carefully crafted and limited almost to the point of uselessness or risk abuse that does more harm than not having legislation would have.

About Me

Herbert (Bert) Knabe Jr. is a blogger specializing in online
security, privacy and intellectual property. He has long been a fan of
Apple computers and occasionally writes on their products. Online since the mid '80s, he has been blogging on a variety of topics
including U.S. policy and online privacy/security since 2005.

He
has twenty years experience in the newspaper industry, initially as a
production artist, then as a computer technician supporting content
producers. This experience gives him a strong understanding of graphic
production for print and web.

Photography has long been a passion
of Bert's, and he was honored to have a photo included in the PDF
version of the 2011 Plus One Collection. He specializes in cell and
smart phone photography.

Bert lives and goes to church in Lubbock, Texas with his wife of twenty+ years and their five children.